A new type of endurance run for me

The dead of summer is upon us and it is as hot as it ever gets in this part of the world. For me, someone who doesn't do early morning runs (I should probably start) but also doesn't have a traditional work-week, it is pretty easy for me to avoid the crowds if I am willing to endure the hotter parts of the day. This is a problem though because in the hottest parts of the year for us it can be dangerously hot out there and some precautions have to be made.

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You may recall about how in the past I was running with a frozen solid water bottle that is actually a squeeze bottle and how it didn't really work out for me because the ice couldn't be used at all for the first 20 minutes or so because it was still a block of ice? Well I found a solution to that: Just drink some water before I ever take off because lets be honest here, we do not need to drink water for the first 20 minutes. Instead, I hold the bottle on my body and alternate hands. It actually has a pretty decent cooling factor that takes place.

After about 30 minutes of running most of the bottle is still frozen but there is an area on the outside that is ice cold water. While running I can at this point take small sips and that is really all I need. I don't need to be gulping down water at this point.

Despite the intense heat and the massive amounts of sweat I am producing, I was able to maintain a sub 7-minute per km pace with relative ease. I'm either getting better, getting accustomed to the heat, or perhaps a combination of the two but by the time 5k clicked over I was ready for a walk, that's for sure, but I also wasn't gassed.

Something funny did happen though and that was that my watch was one notch too lose and I ended up getting some scary and also completely untrue heart-rate information.

I am in my 40's and it would be medically inadvisable to ever get one's heart rate up to 206. An average heart rate of 173 would be a bad idea too over the course of 35 minutes but that's why I am happy to report that neither of these things actually happened. I looked it up after being a bit shocked by this because a heart rate this high would feel like cardiac arrest to most people my age and it wasn't actually happening.

I looked it up and if your watch isn't snugly attached to your wrist when doing this sort of thing you are going to get bogus results. While I am not sure how this flashing light actually works, I do know that it need to be flush with your skin and for me the watch was loose and noticeably so during the run.

My heart rate was high, but I was not maxing out the entire time like these results would indicate.

I stop immediately after hitting 5k and this is when I get my reward of about as cold as ice water can be without being ice. It is absolutely glorious.

Then I walk for a bit (I never stop totally) and then will alternate a jogging pace and a walking pace without any real rhyme or reason to it for the remainder of the water bottle.

As luck would have it, it takes the ice almost exactly 1 hour to completely melt into water and by the time I got home my water bottle was making a bit of a clicking sound because all that remained was the central bit of ice that at that point was around the size of a regular size ice cube.

This is where I was able to definitely confirm that my watch was not attached properly to my arm because I was walking for a lot of this an there is NO CHANCE that I was in VO2 Max territory.

So even though I said this wasn't a good idea the first time I did it all that was really going on was I needed to tweak it a bit. I know can say that departing your house with a 16 oz or so squeeze water bottle (A cycling bottle) is the perfect amount of water for a 1 hour run. It gets me about 7-8 km in that time and ends up taking about an hour. Someone in better shape than I am or is lighter than I am could probably get that number comfortably up to 10km or so.

One thing I am happy about is that during the run I am not intentionally regulating my pace but it just kind of comfortably works itself out to just under 7mins per km.

So that's progress for me. Maybe give it a try!